I can officially report that we are no longer buying a house, because yesterday we BOUGHT a house. Hooray! We took the girls over after school and they had a blast exploring — especially Emma, who’s old enough to understand what’s going on. She checked out each room and the backyard, and then started running circles around the family room-dining room-kitchen loop. She was SO excited, and seeing that immediately relieved a lot of the anxiety I’d been feeling about how she would react to moving.

My mom arrives tomorrow, and my dad arrives on Sunday. Over the next 5 days there will be a lot of packing and a lot of prepping and we should be “all in” at the new place by the middle of next week. I can’t wait!

There’s one layout “quirk” common to most of the houses in the area that we’re moving to: the family rooms aren’t really ideal for televisions. Either TVs were a lot different in the 80s or the builders just didn’t care — the former is definitely true, the latter is certainly possible — but most of the houses we looked at made TV and furniture positioning a bit of a challenge.

Our future living room is no exception. If you walk into the family room from the foyer, the wall straight ahead is all windows overlooking the back yard. The wall to the right has the fireplace and a set of built-in cabinets in a recessed portion of the wall. The “front” wall is really just open to the foyer and stairs, and the wall to the left has some blank space plus a wide doorway into the kitchen. I’ve been playing around with Homestyler, so here’s a rough mockup:

I’ve only been able to come up with two realistic ideas, and they both have some pros and cons.

Mount the TV above the fireplace. This seems to be the go-to solution these days and I know a lot of people who have done it. We would position our couch to face the TV/fireplace. All is well…except that I’m not really a fan of the TV-over-fireplace thing because of how high the TV ends up. Also, underneath the sheetrock, the chimney is brick the whole way up, which adds a degree of difficulty to mounting anything on it.

Put the TV on our current media stand on the wall between the doorway to the kitchen and the stairs. We’d position the couch to face the TV. All is well…except now the back of the couch is in front of the fireplace. I feel like cutting off the fireplace — the focal point of the room — would look strange.

All the other options I’ve come up with seem worse. There’s no way I’m putting a TV in front of the windows. The staircase is open to the living room, and there’s not enough wall space there for a TV. And the built-ins include upper shelves as well so putting the TV there would block those shelves (plus I don’t want to shove the TV back in that recessed corner).

At this point I figure we’ll just have to move things around once we move in and just see what seems to work best. But in the meantime, am I overlooking any other possibilities?

p.s. Thank you to everyone who left moving tips on my last post! All your advice has been super helpful!

When I mentioned two weeks ago that we had enlisted a realtor to help with our “casual” search for a new place, I had no idea that we would see our future house that same afternoon. It all happened really fast, but I suppose that’s kind of how it goes, right? You don’t get to ask a seller to “hold” their house for you for a few days or weeks while you decide. You just either go for it, or you don’t. So we went for it.

Jose and I saw the house on July 1, made the offer on July 2, and spent the next 24 hours panicking about whether we were making the right decision. After calming down and agreeing that yes, we wanted to do this, we accepted a counter offer from the seller. We spent 3+ hours over there on July 8 walking through it with a home inspector and everything looked really good. There were a few repairs recommended but they were all pretty minor, like a broken pane of glass, a drop-down attic stair door that doesn’t properly seal, squirrel-damaged roof jacks, etc. My “big three” — roof, foundation and air conditioning — were all in fantastic shape. We could move in tomorrow and not have to do a single thing.

Our closing is set for the second week of August, and I’ve decided not to post any photos of the house until we officially own it. But the photo above is looking down what will be our new street! What really sold us on this particular house is the location. It’s 5 minutes from work, and I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that. It’s in an older neighborhood with tall, mature trees. (“Older” for this area of Houston means the 1980s.) It feeds into fantastic schools. And the piece de resistance for me? It’s 500 feet from the neighborhood park and pool.

The house itself is about the same square footage we have now, but on two stories. The first floor has the family room, kitchen, dining room, living room/study, a half bath, and the master suite. The second floor has 3 bedrooms and two full bathrooms. We’re essentially swapping out the bonus room in our current house for a living room in the new house…and since the bonus room in our current house is the only thing upstairs, we’ll be going from what’s essentially a one-story floor plan to a more typical two-story layout. It’ll be an adjustment to have the girls upstairs, but it will also be nice to have the additional living room on the first floor since we don’t spend a lot of time in the girls’ bedrooms anyway.

Overall the house is in good shape cosmetically as well. There aren’t too many outdated fixtures or details or paint colors — we don’t really need to change a thing, at least not right away. The room that needs the most updating is the master bathroom where the flooring is mostly carpet (yuck) and the shower stall is small and kind of claustrophobic. I want to replace the flooring in there with tile and update the shower, but everything else is fine. Next on the list would probably be the kitchen and breakfast area, which has brown wood trim and paneling that matches the cabinets. The whole room is just really full of medium brown wood tones, so I’ll probably paint that area shortly after we move in. (The color is the only thing I don’t like about kitchen. And if color is my only complaint, I figure that means it’s a pretty darn good kitchen.)

What else? The front yard is lovely, and the back yard is fantastic with lots of shade and lush plants. The garage is detached, behind and to the side of the house, and is connected to the back door by a short covered walkway. I’m so happy to be moving where the garages are tucked behind the houses instead of an integral part of the front facade — that may not seem like a big deal, but to me it greatly increases the curb appeal of the neighborhood. This garage in particular even has an air conditioner, which seems part crazy and part genius! (I’m seriously considering putting the treadmill out there. Jose has wanted a weight bench for years, so it might make a great mini-gym.)

Whew. So yeah! We are buying a house! Fingers crossed everything continues to go smoothly!

One of my goals for March was to cross at least 5 things off the big list of house updates that I made in February. I’ve already accomplished way more than that! Here’s the rundown:

I replaced the light covers/globes on the ceiling fan in our living room. The old ones were drab and beige; the new ones are bright and white.

I updated the hall bathroom with a new shower curtain, floor mat and towels. This is girls’ bathroom but it’s also our primary guest bathroom since the other one is upstairs. I didn’t go overly kiddie, but it’s definitely brighter and happier now.

I threw out 2 old scraggly plants and replaced them with new foliage. The two houseplants I bought claim to be “plants of steel” — seriously, it said that on their tags because they don’t need much sun or water — so we’ll see if they live up to that name.

I took down the curtains in our master bathroom, which had been there for 6+ years but were too long, held up by an ugly tension rod, and generally boring. I replaced them with a curtain panel from West Elm. I upgraded to a prettier tension rod at the top, and used two other cheap tension rods to create a faux roman shade.

I bought a pot lid rack for our cabinets to replace the old one, which never really worked as well as advertised and wasn’t big enough for all the lids we had down there anyway.

I rearranged several pieces of furniture in the bonus room (and am in the process of selling a coffee table and sofa table) to create two zones — an office area and a TV/reading/hangout area.

An electrician installed ceiling fans in Charlotte’s room and our guest room, swapped out the light fixture on the ceiling fan in our master bedroom so that it now takes bulbs with normal screw-in bases (hallelujah!), and fixed a can light in our kitchen that hadn’t worked in at least 2 years.

Whew! I definitely took care of the low hanging fruit first — things that could be fixed by simply buying something new, or that took an hour or less to finish. There are still several things to do in most rooms, and the next round of updates includes several items I plan to make or install myself. That will take more time. Still, I’m feeling really pleased with myself for staying motivated this month.

Hello!

I'm Sarah, a NASA engineer by day and quilter by night. I live in Houston with my husband and our two young daughters. I've had this ol' blog for more than 15 years, and these days it's home to my quilting work, snippets of family life, and occasional musings on my engineering career.